The Impact of Academia on Our Daily Lives.....One Man's Perspective

Here on the Patch, a reoccurring theme that keeps coming up in our online open discussion group, is the role of academia in shaping discussions and their real world impacts. President Obama receives a great deal of criticism from the political right for being too academic and lacking ‘real world’ experience. This is not unlike the criticism that the early 20th century president, Woodrow Wilson, received; yet his ‘Ivory Tower Idealism’ has helped shape our democracy and our place on the ‘world’s stage’ for nearly a century. President John Kennedy, for good or ill, surrounded himself with what was described as “the best and the brightest”, leading to the “New Camelot”. I think, many conservatives and those of less education are intentionally or unintentionally misjudging and/or fear the role of academia and its impact on the collective well being of our society.

In our distant past, civilization was dependent on the oracles, priests and priestesses, soothsayers, prophets, astrologers and other mechanisms, such as the reading of animal entrails, to give leaders and rulers the insight to rule and guide. From my reading and research, I noticed that over time the relationship between a ruler’s dependency on the supernatural guidance of the oracle to a transfer of dependency on the secularly derived information and guidance to assist in ruling, has remained a need of leadership in general. This is illustrated by the emergence of the philosophers, scholars, and sages of the Far East. As far back as somewhere around the late 22nd and early 21st century BCE, during the Youyu Period, the Chinese Scholar Shun established the education institution Shang Xiang. The emergence of the center for thought and learning flowed westward, emerging in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. Various areas became the centers of teaching and learning, called academies and were established. Babylon, Persia, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Athens were famous centers and represent only the most well known repositories dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, learning and teaching.

Long before the establishment of the academies, men pursued knowledge and understanding of the natural and supernatural worlds. The great questions of humanity, the natural and supernatural world, and human existence were studied seeking to understand the order of things. Western civilization produced such great thinkers and teachers as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Solon and Hillel; just to name a select few of the most familiar and famous who personify the Academic Experience. No matter the scholar and their times, they shared certain leaning and teaching goals. They pursued truth under all types of circumstances, no matter the consequences, drawing on an ever progressive and growing knowledge base. Knowledge has been constantly accumulated, analyzed, replaced and transferred across the generations. The true academic pursues knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The tradition of the academic is to remain honest, unbiased, a lack of commitment to any one outcome of the inquiry, to remain focused on the process, remain ‘virtuous’ in a philosophical sense, uncensored and finally to share the acquired knowledge with others.

Academic knowledge has been treated, at times, like a precious commodity; to be guarded and controlled so that it isn’t used against the established power structure, the maintenance of such, and the traditional belief and cultural systems. There is no greater example in the West than the control exercised by the Roman and Orthodox Catholic traditions and religions of the late Roman Empire through the 17th century CE. Ideology and belief dominated the pursuit of knowledge, constraining knowledge so that it didn’t conflict with the Churches’ doctrines, dogmas, and structures. Even though the ‘Churches’ exercised intellectual pursuit and control, the academia continued to progress, albeit slowly, but by the return of the Christian Crusaders to Europe, the seeds of knowledge had germinated into a force that broke free of the Christian Institutions’ extreme control. By the time of the Renaissance, lost knowledge began to be rediscovered and knowledge exploded on the scene creating a crisis in the structures of Western Civilization. The natural outgrowth of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation was the “Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason”. This is considered to be the beginning of the ‘modern era of knowledge’. We see the separation of knowledge from Church and State and the previous constraint to an independence of thought and inquiry for the sake of knowledge and learning alone. Born was the modern academic and intellectual; independent, learned, seeking and sharing of knowledge.

These clearly are the very qualities of the academic that are the greatest threat to the stationary or fixed mindset of the conservative. The inquiry of the honest academic seeking the pure truth without regard to the ‘real world of application’. The honest academic is the perfect partner to the liberal arts, the hard sciences, and the social sciences. Also, the honest academic, and academia in general, are progressive and liberal in the approach to the acquisition of truthful knowledge. The real academic hasn’t any predisposition to the outcome of the study and acquisition knowledge, remaining ideally apolitical.

The problem for the conservative is that academia pushes pure knowledge to the extent that it often begins to contradict the closely held beliefs of the conservatives and conservatism. Many conservative’s world views contain a heavy dependence on the world of belief and the supernatural. Often when
beliefs are subjected to the scrutiny of cold academic inquiry, the beliefs fall desperately short, when tested for validity. Over the 20th century, academia has repeatedly destroyed a number of belief elements and suppositions of the conservative ideology to the point where conservatives, in the latter part of the century, found it necessary to assemble and organized their own partisan academic ‘hired guns’; thus, politicizing academics. Such organization as the Conservative ‘think tanks’ are dedicated to countering the information flowing our of traditional academia. Not only are they designed to provide evidence to conservative causes and ideology; but to muddle and manipulate information emerging from academia. Nothing is more illustrative of this process than the global issue of ‘Climate Change and Global Warming’ and the responsibility of humanities impact. A preponderance of evidence of traditional academia supports the fact that human activity is a large contributor to both global warming and the subsequent climate change. The goal of the conservative ‘hired guns’ is cast doubt on the evidence and find ways to resist the pressure to make changes to reduce the negative impact on the environment from human activity. The basic stated belief of the conservative group’s are that human activity doesn’t need to be changed since it doesn’t contribute to climate change, the climate change that is currently occurring is a result of the cycles of natural phenomena and the investment in revenue to curb human activity is too great for virtually no impact on the change process. The greatest proponents of this position is headed by Koch Industries, founders and large contributors to the conservative think tanks. It is obvious that Koch Industries has a vested interest in challenging the truth and unbiased academic evidence. Since, to not do so would prove to be so costly to the company that there is a good chance it could not survive.

A popular tactic of conservative counter measures is to provide manipulated and questionably sourced information to the general public. It is presented in such a way as to take on the vestments of authoritative information that is read and cited as evidence to back up pseudo academics’ claims supporting conservative ideologies. Conservatives are masters at marketing information to the general audience and influencing the public with carefully crafted questionable information. The real academics utilize the traditional channels of information distribution and more often than not, the unbiased information never makes it much beyond academia, interested intellectuals and rarely if ever does it make it into the general public. Standard academic information is often difficult to understand, difficult to find without extensive research and often only has limited real world applications.
The conservative movements strategy to discredit and discount traditional academic effort and information, claiming that academics live in the ethers of higher learning associated with colleges and universities. As such, the conservative claims that any information that is distributed from academia supports elitism, which manipulates and controls the uneducated or undereducated who must live in a “real world”. Branding academia and academics as elites conjures up images in the general public of snobbish academic intellectuals as all knowing and manipulating behind the scenes, just as puppet masters, for power and control over the unaware ‘others’. The same tactic is often utilized by those attacking liberals as puppet masters of the impoverished who manipulate to gain votes and subsequently to be kept in power. The careful control of the conservative message and dissemination of information takes on the claim of “common sense”, practical, and revealing of the manipulations of academia and the left.

Something most disconcerting is the conservative right’s attempt to control funding of traditional academic institutions. The goal is to limit serious and honest pursuit of traditional academic avenues of inquiry. How many times have I heard Business Majors complain that their social studies and liberal arts curriculum is nothing but a waste of time. The information doesn’t help with creating and the making of wealth through business practices. They fail to realize that without the academic work done in the social sciences, marketing as a discipline would, most likely, not exist. There is a whole movement of thought and belief that if education doesn’t help one to get employment, then it’s wasted.

The battle will continue between the traditional liberal academics and ‘hired gun’ pseudo academics of the conservative right. It is a battle between real truth and contrived misinformation all oriented to discredit and disable the professional intellectual of academia whose integrity is more important than the amount of money paid for distorting the truth.